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Friday

Jonathan Holiff: My Father and the Man in Black

Jonathan Holiff recalls the journey that led him to the truth about his overbearing father, Saul: the man who struggled to control Johnny Cash and his own demons.

Jonathan
Holiff wanted to forget his father, Saul, after he committed
“rational suicide” in 2005. They'd been estranged for decades,
and Jonathan only had painful memories of the hard-drinking man whose
coldness blighted his youth. He'd left Canada, aged 17, determined to
earn his showbiz father's respect by bettering him professionally.
Despite doing well in Hollywood, none came.

“[My]
entire adult life had been a knee-jerk adolescent reaction to my
father's lack of approval,” Holiff says down the line during a
visit to Los Angeles. “So I realised, after his death, that I was
truly unhappy, and no longer had an interest in the superficial
existence that I had pursued and embraced as a consequence.”

He
sold his business in Tinseltown and drove back to Canada, thinking
he'd also left Saul behind. However, as revealed in his compelling
documentary, My
Father and the Man in Black,
Holiff was in fact beginning a journey that would force him to
re-think his father.

Looming
over their story is Johnny Cash, the Southern Baptist superstar Saul
- a Jew “as serious as a heart attack”, according to band mates -
managed for 13 years, before mysteriously quitting at the height of
Cash's fame. When journalists and biographers started calling with
questions about Saul and Johnny's relationship that Holiff couldn't
answer, his mother remembered that after retiring, her husband had
put his business things into a storage locker.

“I
was unable to bring myself to open the door because I didn't want to
wade into my father's life,” says Holiff. “I was still un-evolved
emotionally. I was still practising denial.”

Two
months after his return, Walk
the Line,
starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June
Carter, his singing partner and second wife, opened, and people
wanted to know what Holiff thought of the glossy biopic. “It seemed
almost as if I was being punished at first, and certainly seemed like
a conspiracy of some kind,” he recalls wryly. Nevertheless, he
reluctantly went along to the cinema, and although Saul was erased
from the film's “whitewashed” storyline, it was eye-opening.

“I
was so unfamiliar with the specifics of my father's career that not
only did I not know that it was Saul who hired June and put her with
Johnny professionally, I hadn't realised that Johnny was famously
arrested [on drug smuggling charges in El Paso] the year I was born.
When I saw that I failed to really watch the rest of the movie,
because it opened a floodgate of repressed or forgotten memories of
childhood.”

Holiff
decided to face the storage locker. “I wanted to find out if there
was anything about his children among his most important documents
and archives. And the answer was, no.”

What
he did find was life changing. Among Saul's belongings – which
included a gold record awarded to him personally for a million-plus
sales of A
Boy Named Sue
– were more than 60 hours' worth of intimate audio-diaries and
recorded telephone conversations between Saul and Johnny. As a child,
Holiff knew Cash as a “very special and kind and generous” man.
Now he discovered a young, pill-popping rebel nicknamed Johnny
“No-Show” Cash whom Saul struggled to manage. (He missed an
entire tour just before Holiff was born, leaving Saul – as he so
often would - to pick up the pieces, and worrying about money.) The
filmmaker also learned that when he was nine months old, he was on
the road with Cash in Toronto, in 1966, when the singer “overdosed
and nearly died, and we all drove to Rochester across the border,
risking arrest for the discovery of pills [hidden somewhere] in the
motor-home.”

Holiff
had never understood before why Saul had treated him and his brother
like clients, including making them sign contracts, while they were
growing up. “I realised that
[Saul] was dealing with a very volatile character in Johnny Cash . .
. who was very much like a wild child, and he perhaps [tried] to
control us from the beginning and mould us into what he expected from
his children.” Holiff rebelled, though, “much like Johnny Cash
did, only not quite as famously and spectacularly.”

Walk
the Line
suggested that Cash gave up drugs - he didn't. The film also failed
to address his becoming Born Again.

Jonathan
always wondered why his father had flown into a rage when he came
home from school, aged eight, and declared that he wanted to be known
as John. “He absolutely blew up, and I thought he was going to
physically kill me and take me apart. He said, 'Your name is not
John, it's Jonathan. John is a Christian name and you shall not use
it.'” Going through Saul's files, he realised that this was around
the same time that another John – Johnny was Cash's stage name -
was trying to convert his father to Christianity.

In
a recording about his childhood, his father says he grew up
surrounded by almost “palpable anti-Semitism.” Nonetheless, he
remained proud of and open about his Jewish identity. One of Holiff's
more surprising finds, therefore, was a photograph of Saul as
Caiaphas – the Jewish High Priest supposedly involved in the plot
against Jesus – in Cash's self-funded film shot in Israel about the
life of Christ, The
Gospel Road.
Saul had never discussed it afterwards, not even with his wife.

“The
conclusion we drew was that he quickly regretted having done it and
it was a source of pain for him for many years,” says Holiff. In
one of the actual excerpts from Saul's audio-diaries used in the
film, he asserts of Cash: “He robbed me of my soul and now I think
he's trying to save it for me with his fundamentalist Christianity
jazz.” Not long after, he resigned.

“I
think he woke up and realised just how far he'd gone without perhaps
even realising what he was doing,” Holiff suggests. “So I think
that's the straw that broke the camel's back in their relationship.”

Listening
to Saul's self-lacerating and self-aware recordings, his expressions
of guilt over not being a better father, and disclosures about his
own troubled upbringing, Holiff came to see Saul as a
three-dimensional human being for the first time. Has he forgiven
him?

“Here
is a guy who was wealthy, successful, had stature, was working with
the biggest-selling recording artist in the world in 1970 - Johnny
exceeded The Beatles' sales in the United States, briefly, in 1969 -
and he never found happiness. So I was very forgiving of him.”

"Your piece is one of the most comprehensive, eloquent, and powerful discussions of the film I have read." Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing

"Stephen, this is a fabulous piece; you did a superlative job in communicating the film and its essence." Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of Deli Man

"I have to thank you. It's a very good [Mein Kampf] article, which you have written; it reflects very sharply and especially fairly the various positions." Dr. Christian Hartmann, Institute of Contemporary History Munich